Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  A small college as King’s then was, splits up into far more sharply defined cliques than a large one, and it was not long before I found myself firmly attached to a small group consisting in the main of Etonians belonging either to King’s or Trinity. The younger fellows of the college mixed very democratically with undergraduates of all years, and the head of this vivid group was certainly Monty James, subsequently Provost of King’s and now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, and Lionel Ford, now headmaster of Harrow, both of them having lately taken their degrees, were of the company, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working for a degree in music, and a little later among junior members R. Carr Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We were all members of the Pitt Club, that delightful and unique institution where, to the end of your life, once being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members of a literary society called “The Chitchat,” in which on Saturday night each in rotation entertained the society at his rooms with an original paper on any subject as intellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup, anchovy toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, for physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went round too early, awful reverberations of sneezing from the unaccustomed punctuated the intellectual fare, and I remember (still with pain) reading a paper on Marlowe’s Faustus, during which embarrassing explosions unnerved me. I had reason to quote (at a very impressive stage of this essay) certain lines from that tragedy, which with stage directions came out as follows:

  Faustus. — Where are you damned? (Sneezings.)

  Mephistopheles. In Hell. (Sneezings and loud laughter.)

  For where I am is Hell (Sneezing and more laughter),

  And where Hell is (Uproar) there must I ever be.

  On another occasion a prominent philologist whose turn it was to regale us, found that he had not had leisure to write his paper on “Manners” and proposed to address us on the subject instead. He strode about the room gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearthrug, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away instead of his match, while he harangued us on this interesting ethical topic, with interspersed phrases of French and German, and odd English words like “cocksuredom.” As this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled down on “The Chitchat”; its decorous members bit their lips, and prudently refrained from looking each other in the face, and there were little stifled noises like hiccups or birds in bushes going about the room, and the sofa where three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then he diverged, via, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the ancient Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a practical illustration to throw himself into the attitude of Discobolus. At that precise moment, Dr. Cunningham of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a great deal, completely lost control of himself. Claret-cup spurted from his nose and mouth; I should not have thought a man could have so violently choked and laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to himself. That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round the entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. Cunningham, finding he could not stop laughing at all, seized his cap and gown and left the room with a rapid and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the open windows as he crossed the court....

  But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, when in rotation, they dined in each other’s rooms. This institution (known as the “T.A.F.” or “Twice a Fortnight”) had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen, that brilliant and erratic genius, then in London, editing The Mirror and astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two later returned to Cambridge again, and, until his final and melancholy eclipse, diffused over everyone who came across him the beam of his intellect and personality. Of him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends met, so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty James. Intellectually (or perhaps aesthetically) I, like many others, made an unconditional surrender to his tastes, and, with a strong prepossession already in that direction, I became convinced for the time — and the time was long — that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the keys of the heavenly kingdom of literature. When dinner at the T.A.F. was over, Monty James might be induced to read about the birthday-party of the Kenwigses, with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter on the reader’s part over Mr. Lillyvick’s glass of grog, cast it forth on to the hearth-rug. He almost made me dethrone Bach from his legitimate seat, and by a revolutionary movement place Handel there instead, so magnificent were the effects produced, when with him playing the bass, and me the treble from a pianoforte arrangement for two hands, we thundered forth the “Occasional Overture.” He was a superb mimic, and at the T.A.F. and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in which the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridiculous yet. And when on these Sunday evenings the Dickens reading, and the “Occasional Overture,” and some singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F. would go to O.B.’s “at home,” and mingle with inferior mortals.

  Another society common to many members of the T.A.F. was the Decemviri Debating Society. To this, some time during my undergraduate days, I was elected, though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to belong to it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, then as now, invariably deprived me of coherent utterance, and a rich silence was all that I felt capable of contributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never attended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was that if any member absented himself for a term (or was it two?) from the debates, he should be deprived of the privileges of membership, I received one day a notice of the next debate, at which there was private business to be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion. Unjustifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to flight, and I was allowed to open another debate in the place of that already arranged for, and to make a speech to show reason why I should not be expelled. My motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a meeting of the Decemviri again.

  I suppose it must have been that belated year of voluntary reading at Marlborough, which enabled me to win an exhibition at King’s at the end of my first term; after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid of all interest in classical subjects. There was not the smallest spur to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or lecturers: if you attended lectures and were duly marked off as present, you had conformed to the rite, but nothing you heard could conceivably stimulate your zeal. The classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we followed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War stood on a dais at the end of the lecture room, and indecently denuded his subject of any appeal to interest. He put his head on one side and said, “Then came Sphacteria: I don’t know what Sphodrias was about,” and so nobody knew what either Sphodrias or Mr. X — was about. He looked over exercises in Greek prose as well: on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and received, for the only time, his warm approval. A piece of Greek prose, according to academic standards, appeared to be good, in proportion as it “brought in” quotations and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo English was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags and unusual words and crabbed constructions from the most obscure passages were supposed to constitute good Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee represented an example of dignified English. To quote from that immortal and neglected work, “Having said these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open them again. He became sotto voce for a few hours, and he went to God about 6 p m.” As this sublime deathbed scene appears to the ordinary Englishman, so would the prose which Mr. X — approved have appeared to the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles.... But he had been Senior Classic, and carried on the wonderful tradition, and in other respects was classical tutor and an eager but inefficient wh
ist-player. Nixon, an equally traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. Any dawning of love for classical language receded, as far as I was concerned, into murk midnight again, and having temporarily justified my existence by winning an exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year and a half to follow more attractive studies. A year’s hard work on the approved Baboo lines, I calculated, would be sufficient to secure success in the Classical Tripos, which was the next event of any importance.

  Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new University magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as myself was joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two or three years our senior, and some B. A. whose name I cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly drew the illustration on the cover of the Cambridge Fortnightly, which represented a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College Chapel. O. B. contributed a poem to it, so also did my brother Arthur, and Mr. Barry Pain sent us one of the best parodies in the language, called “The Poets at Tea,” in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously characteristic of themselves. He also tried to galvanize the Cambridge Fortnightly into life by one or more admirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson applied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant was clearly stillborn, and considering the extreme feebleness of most of its organs, I do not wonder that it was, after the lapse of a term or so, quite despaired of. It had really never lived: it had merely appeared. My share in the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was already too busy writing Sketches from Marlborough, which was duly and magnificently published within a year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be told that I had better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform my father of this literary adventure; then, when a local printer and publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, undertook its production, I thought he would consider it very odd that I had not told him of it before and so I did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached him, and he wrote me the most loving letter of remonstrance at my having kept it from him. There was no word of blame for this amateur expenditure of time and energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still felt that if he had known I was working at it, he certainly would have suggested that I might have been better occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I knew to what entrancing occupation I had really determined to devote my life, and though I might have made a better choice, I could not, my choice being really made, have been better occupied than in practising for it. The book in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part about it (of which the omens have been amply fulfilled) being the extreme facility with which it was produced.

  Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of reverent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of King’s decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the organ, a “huge house of sounds” with walls of gilded pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on Sunday afternoons in the short days of winter would be nearly dark, but for the soft glow of the innumerable wax candles with which the choir was lit, flowing over the organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those Sunday afternoon services, there would still be a little light outside, though that would have faded altogether before service was over, and just opposite where I sat was the window that I love best in all the world. The Saviour has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress of sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She had been weeping and had heard behind her the question, “Woman, why weepest thou?” Her bereaved heart had answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener had said, “Mary.” It was then, in that window, that she knew him, and turning, she bowed herself to the ground, with one hand stretched out to him, and said, “Rabboni!” In the garden of the Resurrection He stood, with the flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spikenard, very precious, with which she had anointed them for his burial.... During the Psalms for the twenty-seventh evening of the month, when she who sowed in tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark against the faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candlelight spread like a luminous fog to the cells of the vaulting above. At the end of the service, the red curtain across the arch in the screen was drawn back, and you peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the night....

  Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill of fare on the chapel door would bring you, a little before anthem time, into the nave, for Wesley’s “Wilderness” was soon to be sung. The choir, when service was going on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but the candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made visible the roof, and the black silhouettes of the trumpeting angels on the organ. Then the solo bass began: there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and the treble solo and chorus of the flight of sorrow and sighing. Perhaps you waited for the conclusion of inaudible prayers, on the chance that Dr. Mann would play a Bach-fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain had been drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries. There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the gamba on the swell started the melodious discussion, and its soliloquy provoked an answer in the same words but with another voice. The duet “thickened and broadened,” fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, and gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one keyboard, silent as yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. What the gamba had stated, the diapason now proclaimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, for what but the Tubas could so have imposed themselves and penetrated that immense and melodious rioting of sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four corners of the organ, “opened their mouths and drew in their breath,” and spoke through their celestial trumpets.

  It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology the infinity of interests that interweaved themselves with these three undergraduate years, and the reader must sympathetically partake of a macedoine of memories, that were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had the emotional experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson double the part of Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and fell violently in love with her. Never surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, never did another actress make such music of the tale of the flowers she had gathered. No sculptor’s skill or whiteness of Pentelic marble ever approached the glory of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of joy I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving of lovely arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was no statue any more but the queen, living and moving again. I bought a photograph of her, carried it about with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover it, for he would not have cared much about this experience of mine. Not for nearly thirty years later did I meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated homage before her.

  Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, as must needs be, of lesser magnitude, now that new constellations directed my voyagings, but, being granted an exeat of two nights in order to witness the opening of Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get half a day at my school. Already the old order had changed; the values were different, and even as I had once suspected, a few months had sufficed to do that. Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed and assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which was imperis
hably part of my personality: my very identity would have been something other than it was, had I not lived and grown up there. But many ties which had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I saw which were the closest of all, and they, just one or two of them, were as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still merry-eyed behind the pince-nez to which he had taken, and that of the friend who on the last day of term had sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He absented himself from an hour of morning-school, and met me, dishevelled with a night journey, at the station. As we passed through the town we bought rolls and sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, making breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, and for that hour it was as if the rind of the last months had been peeled off, and the old friendship glowed like the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little impression I had made on that shining shore was already washed by the advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a little higher up the beach, the sand-castles of others were growing tall and turreted under vigorous spades....